Саймон Спуриэр - Lord of the Night

Kaustus and his gunmachines had not been waiting for her. They'd been waiting for the Night Lord.

They'd always been waiting for him.

Kaustus had kept the Night Lord alive, despite all of her efforts. He'd left a trail of rumours and information, like blood in the water — from Glacier Rat to Slake to governor — to be followed piece by piece, a torturous progression of clues and hints for the beast to pursue. It would lead him here. To this place. To this gallery.

To this stolen item.

'You're waiting for him to open it for you, aren't you?' she whispered, dizzied by the scale of the scheme, the complexity of the lie in which she'd become embroiled. 'You stole it from him, but... but you couldn't open it. You had to wait for him. You had to keep him alive. You had to make him think he was gaining ground, coming for you, all by himself. You wanted him to walk into a trap.'

'Very good,' Kaustus smirked. 'And all without even reading my mind.' He held up his hands as if waving, displaying the thick blood that coated them. 'Which is why the governor couldn't join us, by the way. I couldn't have you performing any... mischief... on the little maggot's brain, could I?'

She peered through into the glassy bridge in which Kaustus had been waiting, and sure enough her eyes fells upon a small, crumpled shape, blood ebbing from its expensive robes. Kaustus shrugged. 'He was very understanding about the whole thing, come the end.'

Nausea boiled through Mita. Bile rose in her throat, and she swallowed back on it with bitter tears in her eyes.

Such duplicity! Such convoluted manipulation!

'Why?' she snarled, lips trembling, face burning. 'Why do all this? You had the power to stop the beast! You had the means to kill it! What could be so important that you've allowed a... an abomination the freedom of the hive?'

For a second the inquisitor seemed uncertain. For a fraction of an instant his face clouded, his brows dipped, and his eyes roved from left to right — as if he were somehow unsure where he was. For an instant his emotions and thoughts uncoiled from his mind, and Mita tasted the childish bewilderment that was an oil-slick through their midst.

'I...' he whispered, lost.

And then his features hardened, the gimlet-glimmer returned to his gaze, and his jaw clenched with an unpleasant rasp. He waved the servitors forwards, and without vocal command two wrapped sinuous arms around her, ignoring her strangled protests and dragging her out of the endless gallery, onto the vertiginous bridge where Kaustus and they had been waiting. The inquisitor followed behind, closing the doors at his back.

'You want to know why?' he smiled, hand reaching inside his robes.

She nodded slowly, mind awash.

His hand reappeared, holding within its grasp a jewelled lasptisol, and he aimed it carefully at her head. She tensed herself, the world dropping away from her.

'That's a question you can enjoy from within the grave,' he hissed, leering.

And then—

The steel eagle, rising up from the base of the metal mountain, tilting its wing towards the highest peak and racing forwards, snapping with beak and claw, to retrieve what belonged to it.

A sudden flicker of premonition, a recalled burst from the furor arcanum she'd endured within the elevator.

'Oh... oh, no...' she muttered, forgetting the gun, forgetting the inquisitor's glaring eyes.

The Night Lord was coming.

The shuttle struck the tower like the sky itself collapsing.

The cockpit crumpled like paper. Brass-edged dials exploded, cable-strewn consoles twisting as their mountings buckled behind them. Limbless servitors and vapid cogitators screamed with what scant vestiges of human surprise remained, ripped apart as conflicting forces crushed them beneath the machines they were created to control. Copper wires whiplashed through bulging spheres of broken glass, sparks infusing the air like miniature galaxies.

For all its smallness, for all its obvious frailty, the craft was built along the same predictable lines as so many other Imperial vessels: a tapered barge with a hammerhead rear and a beak-like prow. Its aquiline hull tore a crevice in the fabric of the hive peak, spewing flame and superheated fuel, burying itself like a dart into flesh.

The universe roared. Everything shook.

In the midsection, behind the flattened ruin of the bridge, Sahaal eased himself from a reinforced bench and checked himself over. Smoke was venting into the crumpled chamber and somewhere an alarm whooped endlessly, but he could find no serious damage to his person. As anticipated, the hardened prow had punched through the hive's armour like a bullet, compacting its forward segments and sparing its aft from damage. Even Chianni, strapped into place beside him, had suffered only scratches and bruises. She appeared to Sahaal unconscious: concussed, no doubt, by the violence of the collision.

The pilot was dead, there could be no doubt of that. What little remained solid of his body hung from between a pair of sealed bulkheads, driven together like the prongs of forceps, a fly beneath a swat. A thin patina of what had once been his flesh decorated the truncated bridge segments, and Sahaal was put in mind of the juice of a crushed fruit, trickling from sealed spaces.

Sahaal shrugged, untroubled by the man's death. He had served his purpose.

It had been Chianni's idea. With the Preafects otherwise engaged in tearing the Shadowkin territory apart, the starport that Sahaal had already invaded once proved deliriously simple to penetrate again. There were few pilgrims travelling now — the lockdown that had gripped the hive had seen to that — and he'd cut through the nominal security at the gateway like a beast possessed. Focused utterly upon the scheme Chianni had tentatively proposed, when the carnage was done he'd looked down to find himself made slick by the blood he'd spilled, a scattered ring of massacred Preafects and servitor bodies patterning the icy launchpad terracrete.

Focused rage. That was the key. Inglorious, he lost himself in carnage in the pursuit of his goal.

Only one shuttle had been ready to depart. They'd boarded it stealthily and followed the curses of its pilot to the cockpit, homing on his mutterings as he berated the indecipherable alarms squawking across the inter-port vox, confused by an inability to contact the orbiting trader he'd been commissioned to join.

'Like there's no warpshit thing up there...' he'd hissed to his servitor crew, even as Sahaal's claws pricked the skin of his neck.

He'd required little persuasion to play along. Chi-anni did the talking. Sahaal found himself too consumed by the burning urge to act to even articulate his words, sliding claws across the puny man's flesh to embellish every threat his condemnitor spouted, using her voice as the perfect counterpoint to his slicing art.

The knife had become a purer medium than mere language.

Let the edge of a blade be his stylus.

Let him cut and cut and cut forever.

Patience... his thoughts had counselled. You know who has it now. You know where it is.

Not long to wait...

They had risen through smoke and gloom, and then the battering flurries of ice that smothered the whole of the planet. Engines whining turbulence rattling at its flanks, the craft had seemed infinitely fragile, an insect at the mercy of a tempest. Sahaal had loomed in the comforting shadows of the bridge, watching the trembling pilot with unhelmeted eyes narrowed, suspicious for any double-cross. Even when Chianni wrenched the steering column from his quivering hands to tilt the vessel towards the broad slope of the tallest peak, the man didn't realise the nature of the journey he'd been forced to undertake.